How grindy is "less grindy"?

[Devsman]

Everyone says it's less grindy than the other version, but I played the other version and let me tell ya, there's a gigantic chasm between acceptable and X Dive.

Hours a day for months got me through like level 8 I think. Part of that was my stubborn insistence on always using my weakest character but still.

[Raven]

like in a day I got to level 108 and I am capable of getting any character I want that isn't locked behind a stage minimum? I have over 600,000 power and I am just clearing events for fun and I can basically max out at least 10-15 characters and weapons.

Like, I know how gacha games works as a veteran of the game, and I can see where it would've taken literally years to get to the point I got to in a day

edit: and for the record, I'm just "casually" playing, like enjoying the story, reading the stuff, stopping to learn where deep elements are, if you know what you're doing and know specifically what characters to get and what to unlock, you could be much stronger much faster.

TL;DR: if you played this solidly for a week, you'd probably max out most things and be super overpowered and have at least your dream characters maxed out and probably maybe grinding to max out freebies or characters you don't care as much about just because you did everything else.

[Icy Wind]

I have made more progress in two days of playing Offline than I did in three years (on and off) of playing Online as a free player.

[Mother Aeris]

The game is generous with handing out zenny and elemental metals, and it respects your time with the events intended for grinding, like the dive trigger enhancements or armor upgrade pieces. Although you have full access to turning events on/off from the start, it won't be until around Lv. 70 that you can comfortably complete them, after which you have a third, easily farmable currency for the event exclusive items in the shop. Keeping that in mind, and working through the main story levels in between the "grindy" event stages should allow you to easily max out a handful of characters, weapons, cards, and possibly a full set of armor from the high-tier bolts before the "end" of the game.

For context, I got the game the day it dropped, and I've only now just finished the main story levels with a power level of roughly 660'000. The game fully respects your time now, but it will still expect you to put the time in if you to go the extra mile for all its characters, weapons, and cards.

[PewPew]

Like you can max a char in an hour of 2 of farming. And if you only use 1 character, 1 set of weapon and the same chips, you'd be maxed out before you even need to grind. It's that easy.

However the main story rewards are one time only and subsequent runs only give a portion, so it's either you go through the story or do the "Event" stages to actually grind.

[The Trippy Pyro (MPH! MPH! MPH!)]

for starters you get s-ranked x and zero VERY early on who can steamroll a lot of stages.
and the game gives away currency like candy.
i think the only "grindy" thing is navigating the menus to power yourself up once you level up.
the cap is 200, and every weapon can be leveled to 200 but cant exceed your current level.
either go through the stages (which give out huge payouts upon first completion.) or go to the event stages to farm.

[Zeo]

Maxing weapons is way more expensive than characters, you can purchase the experience materials in the shop using Zenny, so higher is your level, better Zenny farm you can do at the special stage and unlock things easily.

Also you can use quartz for some characters and weapons, so there's practically zero Zenny evolved and it's a great scapegoat.

[Chaos 混沌 カオス]

In fairness, online did have a level cap that was raised with every few updates. Here, we get the max of 200 right off the bat.

[CrowRising]

You don't really start hitting much of any grind at all whatsoever until you're almost finished with the story, and just finishing the story doesn't involve anything egregious. Unlocking and upgrading your favorite characters is rather effortless. The only genuine grind the game has is for full completion; reaching max level, unlocking and upgrading everything, and in general just doing everything there is to do. If you have no desire to go to such lengths, there's very little grind in the game at all. If you do desire to go all the way, you will encounter a lot more grind late into your experience but it's still more enjoyable than the online version because you don't have to deal with stamina systems that force you to wait a day until the server refreshes.

In particular, you will find that one of the biggest conveniences is how they overhauled the character unlock system. The gacha was removed entirely, and instead you just unlock characters as story rewards or by directly grabbing them from the shop. There's no microtransactions anymore, so the only thing stopping you from unlocking a character is either not having enough Zenny/EM/Event Coupons to afford them which is easy to remedy, or them being barred off behind a progression barrier which honestly isn't all that big of an issue.

Overall, this is by far the definitive way to play and is actually fun, as opposed to the online version which is fun for a little while and then becomes more "daily chore" than "video game".

[Rocket2049]

i hit lv37 in like 3 hours pretty much levelling up every stage from chapter 1 to chapter 5
theres zero stamina, limting crap, or waiting whatsoever
the game loads super fast (obvious considering no online connection at all and not a phone)
zero gacha summons, a whole lot of the things use Zenny straight up... non-event character can be bought with zenny.
event characters use event tickets, which unlock at lv60 (all events unlock at 60)
it sounds like you can farm ANY event not just the specific character ones, so meaning pick the easiest event stage and go to town until you unlock em all.
as for my progression, i used the S-rank Zero the game gives you from 3-starring in like chapter 1 i believe?
i went through stages 1 to 4 without upgrading or levelling anything,
when i got to stage 5 i upgraded everything the game showed me (click power level on main menu to see recommended power and what to upgrade) i had 4 TIMES the recommended. since you need like 600k power for events (recommended anyways) i'm at 300k at chapter 5 already, out of 12 chapters
did i mention just about everything is ZENNY!? even upgrade materials, exp, skill mats, i honestly didn't see anything i couldn't easily get my hands on.

Hands down, you can break this game very very very fast

I ABSOLUTELY HATED the phone game
even as a gacha phone game it was horrible, i have tolerance for that crap (i played a lot of Kingdom hearts union, FF record keeper, opera omnia, another eden, octopath COTC, genshin impact, star ocean mobile, Dragon quest Tact, Nier Reincarnation, pretty much any Square enix phone game i've tolerated enough to keep playing)
there has been only ONE single mobile game with gacha i 100% had zero issues with and that was Dragalia lost... and it shut down anyways, RIP actual good games dying

[William Shakesman]

S Rank Zero and S Rank X were super late game SSRs in the original. Giving them to you for free so early is totally just handing you endgame powercreep day one. Beautiful.

The simplest answer is it's still a mobile gacha game just with no gacha, so there is a bit of repetition, but the core rewards are so generous grind is only if you are going for fanatical completionism of all units and highest tier content, and in that end it is a Mega Man game you could basically play forever but if you don't want to do that you can just build a set or two of gear/char and be great